Early Years:

My oldest brother is named after [our] father, he was a junior and he was Harry Leeland Lawson, so he was Harry. And my brother Tom was named after my mother’s father, so that was Tom. Just to be perverse and cute, my youngest brother is Richard Green Lawson so we could have Tom, Dick and Harry (laughter) and Linda.

I came to Hollins because my mother wanted me to come back to the area (after Prep School at St. Catherine’s in Richmond, VA) and she loved Hollins. It had been good for her…and mother really thought it would be much cooler if I came back to Hollins. And my brother who has always been involved, convinced me that if I would go to Hollins, he would make it possible for me to go on Hollins abroad. He would talk mother into letting me go to Hollins abroad.

When I first came to Hollins they still had dress rules. You had to wear dresses, not skirts nor pants to dinner. And you couldn’t go barefoot. There were various rules I was always running afoul of. And it was hard for me because my family lived in Roanoke and knew all the folks. They were friends with the president of the college and vice president of the college. And every time I turned around I would be barefoot on front quad and there would be Evelyn James, her husband was vice president at that point.

But, that was my freshman year and, and within about 18 months all the rules were gone: men were allowed in the dorms: there were no curfews.

There was a bra burning on front quad, but I didn’t go.

They also got rid of all departmental requirements. There was a huge movement away from any sort of General Educational requirements. All the schools were doing that kind of thing. And it took them [Hollins] about another 15 years to get things back in place.

I took a lot of courses from Jesse Zeldin. I had a minor in Russian Lit. John (Lex) Allen was wonderful and I have thought back on him often because his course annoyed me. He taught a course in Shakespeare that was quite good but he was damned and determined it would be student driven which seemed really, again, I graduated from Hollins in ‘72; you’re talking prime time for all this stuff. So even Lex was willing to try this kind of technique and he made us run that class, do student presentations, and decide on this, that and the other. It really annoyed me because I knew he knew more about Shakespeare than we did and therefore we were really losing out on his lectures. But on the other hand he guided us astutely and he didn’t let us miss much. And it was a technique that was actually very alternative and I used very often since.

I went to Brown because they didn’t require GRE’s. I didn’t really think they’d let me in but they did. Because I was just a little girl from the South and I made good grades at Hollins; but that’s not Ivy League stuff. I was perfectly able to do just fine. And most people would say things like ‘I didn’t know anyone who talked the way you do had any sense.’ And they all [said], ‘but you do.’

Visit the website: Brown University　

After Brown I went to Albany School for girls, a little private girl’s school in Albany, New York for a year. But I re-met my husband the same day that I took the job, so I didn’t last but a year. I came home and got married.

Visit the website: Albany Academy

The nice thing about Brown was they didn’t spend a whole lot of time teaching you how you teach since it’s usually not a very successful technique any way. That MAT program spent very little time on that and most of the time you were actually taking courses in your core subjects, so I spent most of my time at Brown taking English courses as if I were a PhD Student. And they had a summer practicum where we practice taught; a really neat summer program for advanced students who were just our guinea pigs and I was able to do that fairly successfully. And then I student taught in a kind of fancy "Classical High." It was one of those schools in Providence that was a "you could apply to the school within a district" because it was more rigorous. It was kind of like a prep school but it was a public school. So all my training said yes can go do that. So I didn’t have any specific orientation with what I needed to do with students when I was in Albany Academy for girls but I had a whole background in St. Catherine’s. I don’t think you teach people to teach. And kids or people either sort of have a bent toward that or they may have plenty of subject matter, knowledge and be dreadful.

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